UNDP CASE STUDY

UNDP Case Study

Case Study: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

Question 1

Provide detailed critical analysis of this organisation's approach to, and use of, web metrics. What are the key issues and limitations of the current approach? Consider technical, strategic and managerial issues in your answer.

The goal of the UNDP currently is to meet the aims outlined by the Millennium Development Goals, till the year 2015. These goals are related to areas such as hunger, education, world poverty, environment and children's health. The company makes use of web metrics strategies in order to support its core objectives (Clifton, 2012, pp. 25). It has developed various websites that are aimed at supporting its external and internal stakeholders. For this purpose, the company has designed internal websites that play the role of intranet in order to facilitate sharing of knowledge and communication, known as Knowledge Management Workplace (Sterne, 2012, pp. 38).

The organisation has also created 13 external websites that are private and serve specific stakeholders for the purpose of communication, online communities of practices such as water management, human rights and climate change, and sharing of knowledge. Public websites have been formed in order to encourage the work done by UNDP, they publish articles, newsletters and reports for raising funds and donations (United Nations Development Programme, 2012). Promotion is also done through social networking sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Flickr for bringing awareness among people in relation to the important areas (Sterne, 2012, pp. 92).

The organisation also makes use of Content Management Systems which allow non-technical staff to modify and update their own content on web. Special use is made of the Web 2.0 paradigm and all websites use the analytical tools of Google Analytics and Omniture for generation of around 100s of reports and metrics on activities of websites (Clifton, 2012, pp. 41).

Some issues need to be considered when discussing web metrics in terms of the organisation and these include evaluating the particular strategic problems. Website traffic was noticed to be low even though the content was made with precision and was detailed. In search engine results, the content placed by UNDP was either invisible or insufficient when compared with published articles from other sources such as research bodies and news agencies. There was a lack on the organisation's part to attract the relevant traffic to website and influence them to take the desired action required by UNDP (United Nations Development Programme, 2012, p.n.d).

This was due to the absence of a database approach that would have allowed capturing, targeting and segmenting web users in order to bring a greater percentage of site traffic and encourage a higher percentage of action taken by the visitors. A large proportion of the site traffic came only from a significantly small proportion of internal users that were internal, and a higher amount of time was required to be given by the staff for the purpose of producing reports that were based on website metrics. Not much was done concerning the social media marketing ...